17 - Creating a watermark in After Effects

I'm not sure where to ask this question, but I've been trying to make a .png the background image of a 5 sec video. When I run the video the image disappears after a fraction of a sec. What am I doing wrong?

Hey, welcome back, in this video were going to look at creating a watermark on top of our video using after effects. To do this what we need to do is we need a graphic to bring in and use as a watermark. You could just use the type tool here, and skip bringing in an object and just type in your brand or your URL or something. But what were going to do is bring in a graphic, the graphic can be anything, its probably best if it has a little bit of transparency. So maybe you’ve used something like Photoshop or illustrator, I've used illustrator to make a little Bring Your Own Laptop logo that I wan to stick in the bottom right corner here to water mark it.

So I'm going to import, I'm going to double click this area down here, or the long way , I never go the long way, so import file. I'm going to double click down here. bring in watermark.ai now it just needs to be an ai file or a png so it has some transparency, it doesn’t really matter you just have to make sure its good enough quality, if it’s a really budget logo that’s now very nice its going to look pretty bad. But I've got this ai file, watch this I click and drag it, and I just drag it where I want it. I've made mine the perfect size for this so you might have to scale yours up and down. We've got a video later on, on how to get the most out of illustrator and Photoshop but for the moment lets just drag this one on and get it in here. what id like to do is lower the opacity of it. So my watermark layer is I would like to drop this down and actually what id like to do is lower the opacity of it all, but also, oh didn’t think of that. So I'm going to have to have my watermark over here. Good call. Or in the top right, up to you. I probably now want this on the other side and the watermark down here. But well live with it. So I'm going to have it down here.

So what were going to do is change the overall opacity of it and then were going to get it to fade in as well, so what well do is well turn in here, transform, there's one called opacity which is just how see through it is and you can just drag this to the left. You can see I'm going to drag it right down, its see through, its up to you or you might do a scrub along just to see, mines viewable the whole way through because I'm on quite a dark background. You might have to have a different logo, you might have to have a black version or do what I've done, I've actually added a drop shadow and brought it in. you can add a drop shadow in after effects as well if you like.

So we've got this but I actually want animate, and I don’t actually want it on the whole time I want to maybe have that bit and then it fade in so there's a couple of things I can do. I can drag the beginning of this so it only starts about there so he goes and he just appears and what well do is well get it to fade in so I want to get this to snap to the beginning of my timeline. What key do is hold down to get it to snap? That’s right, shift. Grab shift, drag my play head, snaps at the beginning, opacity and I'm going to set a key frame for it, so were at 24 at the moment. I'm going to set it down to zero and then shuffle along a little bit and I'm going to set it up to 24 again. So it starts at zero, gets up to 24 and because I don’t change it anywhere else it just hangs at 24. So ready, space bar, plays along, that fades in, that slides in, that fades in and stays for the whole thing.

If yours is stopping previewing like mine, its because I've run out of hard drive to cache it, it gets around here and stops, oh its got a bit more now, its doing alright. Can you see it’s chasing itself, that’s fine it just means that I'm killing my computer trying to do these tutorials. So what were going to do is I'm going to do what we did before, go to view I'm going to go to preview, there he is there, its got a bit small and I'm going to switch this to maybe skip every second one. It’s going to get a bit jumpy but at least its going to preview the whole way through. I like to pretend there's something I'm meant to do there, so I can show you guys but its not its just because my computer is getting stressed out. So it’s a bit jumpy but you can see, slides in, slides in, you appear, water mark the whole time.

Lovely, that’s how to watermark. Alright, lets hit space bar, lets save this one and lets move onto the next video.